Wit Over Ignorance

And they're off

It's not very often that a space in this blog is reserved for vehicular accompaniment, but then again, it's not very often that we go on holiday in our very own vehicular device. This year, however, the planes had all crashed in the Hudson or vanished over Brazil, so on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we piled into the family lumberbus for a long distance trudge southward. Where are we going ? How long will we stay ? Why are we carrying a one-wheeled bicycle on our roof ? For the answers to these and many other questions, dear reader, you'll just have to keep on reading our daily updates for the next, oh I don't know, month or so......

Behind the veil

She's getting perilously close to that deeply distressing phase where every time I point my camera at her, she sticks her tongue out, but every now and then she forgets to annoy me. The results are usually worth waiting for......

Walking the dog

With that pink hat, she looked as though she'd escaped from a Victorian fairytale. I don't think many Victorians took plastic robot dogs for a walk, though.

A day at the opera

So we dumped the kids, abandoned the dog, and took off for New York for a grown-up weekend. Eat your hearts out, my little sweetie-pies - we had a ball and we didn't miss you a bit.

First stop, naturally, was cocktails, and the second stop was cocktails. After cocktails at the third stop we went to dinner for some more cocktails. The plan after that was to stop at a nightclub for a last round of cocktails on the way home, but for some reason Sylvie couldn't stand up straight and she demanded a taxi back to the hotel. She's getting old, you understand. These French women have no stamina.

The next thing we knew it was morning, so we stayed in bed and watched Brad Pitt take on the Nazis. It seemed entirely appropriate that the entire plot should revolve around a moment when the Brit-disguised-as-a-German ordered three cocktails.

After that it was grown-up shopping and then the main attraction on the weekend agenda: a visit to the New York City Opera for the opening matinee performance of Don Giovanni, which for those of you unfamiliar with Mozart's greatest songfest, involves a lecherous old fool who can't stop chasing after women. Any resemblance to real-life persons is strictly co-incidental.

All in all it was definitely an experience to be repeated. So we're off to Madame Butterfly in March, when I'm definitely going to try that rather nice-sounding spiced martini.

Sweet 17

You take better portraits of yourself than I do, babe. You fill my heart with love and pride. Happy Birthday from all of us.

Gogglers

Exhausted by witches and ghouls and bats, they collapsed on the sofa to watch The Little Pony. Or The Three Little Pigs and The Baby Wolf. Or anything that wasn't too scary....

Scary Perry

Halloween is over for another year (boo hoo) but here's a last dose of frightfulness from our two scariest monsters. We took them up the road to Perry Street, where local residents engage in a flamboyant street frightfest. Hundreds of people turn out to visit houses transformed into haunted grottos, cemeteries full of living dead, and prisons incarcerating psychotic chainsaw murderers (I dunno, maybe the last guy lives like that in real life, too). Much fun was had by all, and you'd have to be a ghoul with a heart of stone not to be terrified by the pink and purple apparitions below. Same time, same place, next year then......